


the fork beside the spoon beside the knife

by damnslippyplanet



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e07 Sorbet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2019-02-03 22:57:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12757854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: Will’s last-minute decision to change his mind and stay for the dinner party solves some of Hannibal’s problems while creating others.





	the fork beside the spoon beside the knife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kronette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kronette/gifts).



> This one's commissioned by kronette as part of the Fandom Loves Puerto Rico auction. Kronette wanted Will making a move, Hannibal not entirely knowing how to deal, and also a bit about a sock, but otherwise left things up to me. And apparently my brain really wanted to know what would happen if Will stayed for dinner at the end of "Sorbet", so here we are, with all the love to Kronette for donating to an excellent cause.

_...the fork beside the spoon beside the knife (the linen napkin, and the centerpiece: a blue beheaded blossom floating in a bowl)—_

_and even the red weight of my best efforts poured into your glass as a dark wine before I tossed the table onto its side_

_Laura Kasischke, “O Elegant Giant”_

  
*

Will’s last-minute decision to change his mind and stay for the dinner party solves some of Hannibal’s problems while creating others.  The practical problems are the most easily tackled. The startling leap of Hannibal’s pleasure at the concession can be set aside for future consideration.

He presses a drink into Will’s hand and puts him to work rearranging the place cards.  Shuffling everyone down a spot to clear a space at Hannibal’s side is an inelegant solution, as is asking Will to do the work that the hired staff are paid to do. But Hannibal has no intention of leaving Will to the tender conversational mercies of the guests at the far end of the table all night, or of giving him unoccupied time before their arrival to reconsider his evening plans.  

Will evinces a grumpy displeasure at the card he’s displacing from the seat at Hannibal’s right.

“Who’s Elaine Komeda?”

“She’s an old friend,” Hannibal responds absently, one track of his mind busy thinking about portions and plating while another makes a note that one of the catering staff had poorly hidden laughter in a feigned cough when he had invited Will to stay.  He will have to insist that the company not send her again.  Perhaps, when sufficient time has passed, additional measures will be appropriate. He routes his thoughts back to the present and adds, “This party is largely her doing.  She’ll like you.”

Will moves her card one seat down and then begins to do the same with the next and the next before saying, “You don’t think I’ll like her.”

“I think it would be presumptuous of me to guess who you will like. You’ve already done me the favor of staying.  I won’t ask you to exert yourself any further by having a good time.”

Will appears startled by the sharp bark of his own laugh, brittle-sweet as spun sugar.

“I’ll try to keep an open mind, Doctor,” he offers.

Hannibal supposes it’s the most he can ask for.  He leaves Will to his work and returns to the kitchen to keep the caterers on task.

 

*

 

“I don’t usually enjoy tartare,” Elaine says as she puts away the next-to-last bite of her helping, “but I make an exception for Hannibal’s dinners.  I can always rely on him to make something exquisite.”

Will eyes the bite suspended on his own fork and then glances to his side to catch Hannibal’s eye.  “I don’t think Doctor Lecter would know how to make an ordinary appetizer if his life depended on it.”

Hannibal considers what Will might be thinking of: cheese and cracker plates.  Sausages wrapped in halfhearted pastry.  Dishes that would hardly be worth the scant effort it would take to make them.  

“I try to only invite exceptional people to my table,” he says, “and to serve them dishes to match.”

Will chews and swallows his bit of tartare and then casts a glance at the tray of offal in front of him, highly decorated but still recognizably itself.

“I don’t know what it says about your guests if this is what matches us.”

“Entertaining a group requires its own considerations,” Hannibal says.  “What matches the group may not be what I would serve for each individual member.”  

It’s not entirely true.  He would have fed Will the tartare regardless for the sheer pleasure of his throat bobbing as he swallows the nearly-translucent slices of raw, red meat. There are a few moments of quiet leavened by the sounds of forks and plates, and a laugh from the far end of the table at a conversation that Hannibal is paying no attention to.

When Will speaks again his voice is warmer and less tart.

“Scrambled eggs,” he says.  

Hannibal cherishes the memory of the early morning sunlight in Will’s dingy motel room.

“In my own defense I can only say that the options were limited and we were far from my pantry.”

“It was good. I might have kicked you out if you’d tried to feed me raw steak for breakfast,” Will says.

Elaine is impeccably polite.  Her eyes widen only very slightly, almost precisely the amount that Will’s narrow at the same moment and the same implication.  There is a long, delicate moment when either Hannibal or Will could clarify the collegial circumstances of their first breakfast together.

No clarification is forthcoming.  Elaine coughs delicately and signals to catch the eye of the waiter with the wine.  Will’s smile is very nearly vicious when he turns his attention back to his plate and spears another bite.

Hannibal asks Alana about her current crop of students.  He doesn’t listen to his own question, much less her answer.

 

*

 

Will behaves himself through the next course.  He feigns interest in gossip about a social circle he isn’t part of and doesn’t care about, compliments the wine, and lets Alana draw him into telling a self-deprecating story about one of his dog rescues.  

“Paisley,” he says, “because the final straw for her previous owner was when she ate a paisley silk sock and they had to pay hundreds of dollars for surgery to get it out again.  So they just _gave her up_ over a _sock_.”  

He looks horrified at the previous owner. Hannibal’s guests look horrified to be discussing a dog’s internal organs over dinner. Hannibal can’t remember which one of Will’s menagerie is Paisley. Perhaps the little one with the bizarre teeth.  He makes a mental note not to leave any handkerchiefs within her reach.

Hannibal wonders whether anyone else can tell how uncomfortable Will is, sparking to genuine life only during the discussion of his dog. Alana can, perhaps, but her kindness in including Will extends only so far.  Hannibal suspects her of being as easily fooled by Will as she is by Hannibal himself.  To the rest of Hannibal’s guests, Will is a curiosity: an outsider, underdressed and unfamiliar, interesting but ultimately forgettable.

It’s to that end that Will finds himself pressed to discuss his work as if he’s a novelty, dancing for his supper.

“It must be rewarding to save lives,” Roger says from across the table, leaning forward.  His eyes gleam less at the prospect of saved lives than that of hearing some grand guignol tale that he can carry back to his law firm colleagues like a prize.  He doesn’t care about the lives saved; he cares about the cheap thrill of their loss.

Perhaps Will scents his own blood in the water and is uninterested in being torn to pieces.  Or perhaps it simply amuses Will to push Hannibal in the path of the oncoming bloodthirst, as much as it does to escape it himself.  He nods toward Hannibal, raises his eyebrows in a gesture that must seem nearly sincere, and feeds Hannibal gently to the wolves.

“The lives saved in my line of work are mostly hypothetical,” he says.  “It’s not as if you ever know who the future victims would have been.  Not like our host, saving lives up close and personal with his bare hands.  Did you tell your friends about that, Hannibal?”

Several pairs of eyes swivel to Hannibal, who graciously accepts the spotlight and tells a variant of the Devon Silvestri tale.  Will relaxes, freed from being the center of attention. He manages to smirk only once, when Hannibal points out that he did _not_ in fact use his bare hands, but wore gloves like a civilized ex-surgeon.

The expression on Will’s face isn’t precisely the look Will had given him that night, odd and searching, standing in the darkness just outside of anyone’s attention except Hannibal’s. But it’s enough to provide a resonant echo.  Hannibal nearly loses his train of thought.

Even in its bowdlerized version, stripped of details to protect both the innocent and the less-so, the tale satisfies the dinner party. Hannibal’s guests have a story of murder and lives saved to take home with them, a grotesque party favor of sorts.  They praise Hannibal for his quick action and clever life-saving hands and move along to less gruesome topics.  Something about the schedule for the next opera season.  

Hannibal thinks of jackals or hyenas settling in to bask in the sun after a feast. He listens to them with half an ear as Will excuses himself quietly and slips away from the table.

 

*

 

Will’s absence stretches out, enough to be noticeable but not worrisome. Hannibal pays it little mind until one of the waiters murmurs in his ear, _sotto voce,_ that his guest would like to speak to him for a moment.

Hannibal excuses himself and leaves Alana to preside over the festivities until his return. He considers possibilities as he moves toward the sitting room. One of Will’s fits of lost memory, perhaps, or a panic attack. He’s prepared for the possibility of a seizure, although he hadn’t noticed Will’s fever scent spiking particularly high this evening to bring one on.

Instead:

“I hate them,” Will says, entirely steady and himself, eyes bright with something more akin to amusement than illness. “I hate all your friends.”

Hannibal’s sure they can’t be heard from the dining room - he knows precisely how and where sound carries in his house, with good reason - but he steps inside the room and closes the door behind him anyway before he answers.  

“Not all of them are my friends,” he offers. A truth for a truth.  

Will trains his gaze on Hannibal, eyes skittering only slightly to the side. “No,” he says, half to himself. “But I thought more of them would be. I thought you belonged here and I’d be the interloper.”

Hannibal listens, still and intent.

“They don’t see a damn thing. They don’t see _you,_ ” Will says, wondering. He steps closer, and closer again. “Those people don’t have any idea who you are, do they?”

Hannibal’s control over his autonomic nervous system is excellent, but not absolute. Blood rushes in his ears at an unaccustomed rate. There are two knives in the room and enough heavy objects to do injury if needed, but there’s a table full of people outside and he doesn’t understand what’s given him away.  

“You hate them as much as I do,” Will says.

His voice is a tenderness Hannibal’s heard directed at dogs and orphan girls but never at himself, but there’s no time to consider that when Will kisses him.

Will _kisses him_.

Hannibal barely registers the tiny disappointed sting he feels at understanding that whatever Will has seen tonight still isn’t the truth of him. That’s fine. It’s better. If he’d _seen_ , Hannibal would still have to be thinking about the knife under the chair cushion and the sharp, deadly tines of the antler sconces.

Instead he doesn’t have to do anything but reach and find, blind but unerring, as if his hands finding their way to Will’s back are just following a well-worn path home. The kiss is an awkward thing, unpracticed. No matter. Will tastes like Hannibal’s cooking and the sweet scent of his fever rises in Hannibal’s nose and Hannibal knows in his bones that now he can never let Will go.

There are plans to be unravelled and re-woven; bait to be reeled back in, traps to be re-laid in new formations.

There are dinner guests to be shooed as politely as possible out the door, and catering staff to pay.

Will’s hand on the back of Hannibal’s neck is cold, and needs to be warmed.

Hannibal’s mind stutters and can’t quite determine which of these things is important or whether any of them matter as much as the small sound Will makes. Hannibal drinks it from Will’s mouth; he wants to follow it down into the red warmth of Will’s throat.

 _There are guests,_ he thinks vaguely.  _There are guests_ and surely that matters, surely there’s a reason to care about things outside this room. Possibly he’s said that out loud because:

“Get rid of them,” Will says, close enough that Hannibal can feel the puff of his breath.

The moment when Hannibal misunderstands Will’s request is breathtaking, electricity crackling under his skin before he remembers that Will doesn’t mean _that._   

“It would be impolite to end the party early,” Hannibal says, but he knows they both know he doesn’t mean it.

“I don’t actually care,” Will says with a grin as he steps back. He sees so much and is blind to so much when he adds, “and neither do you. Not really. I can see that now.”  He reaches to smooth Hannibal’s facade, the lapels rumpled by Will’s own hands, and then goes on, “Sorry. I’m not trying to profile you, I swear. This is why I don’t go to parties.”

Some other evening, Hannibal would enjoy pressing Will for his idle, acerbic observations of the other guests. But Will made a request, even if it was rudely framed as a command.

“I may be able to make an excuse,” he allows. “But it will take some time. Will you wait here?”

Hannibal’s more or less unrumpled now but Will’s fingers skim over him anyway, straightening lapels that don’t need it, borrowing warmth.

“I told you I’d stay,” he says. And then, with a flash of teeth that might be a smile or a snarl: “Anyway, I was here first.”

Hannibal really can’t be blamed, he’s certain, for kissing Will again.

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I don't know how Hannibal's getting all of these people out of his house so he can make out with Will about how superior these two jerks both feel to everyone else at this dinner party, but I'm sure he'll figure it out somehow. Maybe I'll come back and write about that someday. If you've got any suggestions or otherwise want to find me to discuss Murder Husbands, feel free to hit me up in the comments or over at [tumblr](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com).


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